This is one of the first bits I've done for film - in case you were interested.
The bloke is the erstwhile Mr B!!
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Monday, 30 November 2009
Our own theatre company's first review!
Review of Unacknowledged Acts of Desire
 | "Late night at the museum" by Coco Hall for remotegoat on 30/11/09 |
Scrawny Cat's Unacknowledged Acts of Desire, a short play performed in a gallery at the V+A and telling the untold story behind some of the pictures, is exactly the sort of thing I'd like to see more of.
Part of Friday Late at the V+A, the theme of the evening was 'Making a Scene'; an evening to tap the surface of lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer culture to celebrate making visible what for so long has been hidden. There were a number of performances, talks, and short films going on throughout the gallery, one of which was Unacknowledged Acts of Desire.
Two Victorian women, bustles rustling, appear on the stairs at the back of a gallery. What plays out is the fanciful story behind some of the pictures. The women meet, one of them falls passionately in love, the other more viscerally so. Their stories are told in a sort of loop, from scene to scene, as the secret relationship develops, ebbs and flows and then dies when they are spotted together.
The setting in the gallery is effective and added a sort of magical quality to the play; it was as if the ghosts of the pictures had come alive. A sweeping double staircase allows the lovers to disappear off between scenes, although at several points they were masked by one of the grand columns that are used to great effect in a garden scene.
The relationship is played beautifully by the two actresses, all swooshing skirts and clicking heels, in the lofty gallery space. The play's writing is subtle and never in-yer-face, and uses music and dance to great effect. At the end of the day it's a sweet, touching story about a lasting secret love, rather than a diatribe about sexuality.
The next Friday Late is on 29 January and the theme is a Renaissance Ball. On the strength of what I saw, the evening is well worth a visit.
| Event Venues & Times | |
| finished | Victoria and Albert Museum | Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London, SW7 2RL |
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It's even more amazing when you consider we wrote it ourselves. Me, Farley and Flea did the words, the Kiwi did the music and one of my work friends choreographed the dance. I'm so proud!!
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Great great interesting article... From NY Times
The Referendum
By TIM KREIDERRecently an editor asked me for an essay about arrested adolescence, joking: “Of course, I thought of you.”
It is worth mentioning that this editor is an old college friend; we’ve driven across the country, been pantsless in several nonsexual contexts, and accidentally hospitalized each other in good fun. He is now a respectable homeowner and family man; I am not. So I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something condescending about this assignment? Does he consider me some sort of amusing and feckless manchild instead of a respected cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, who’s been in a committed relationship for 15 years with the same cat?
My weird touchiness on this issue — taking offense at someone offering topay me money for my work — is symptomatic of a more widespread syndrome I call “The Referendum.”
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.
It’s especially conspicuous among friends from youth. Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities immutably set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before becoming their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.
I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.
What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to just sit and stare at the emptiness at the center of your life. But I’m sure that to them this problem seems as pitiable as morbid obesity would to the victims of famine.
A lot of my married friends take a vicarious interest in my personal life. It’s usually just nosy, prurient fun, but sometimes smacks of the sort of moralism that H.G. Wells called “jealousy with a halo.” Sometimes it seems sort of starved, like audiences in the Great Depression watching musicals about the glitterati. It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences. Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating.
I regard their more conventional domestic lives with the same sort of ambivalence. Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within 12 hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. [Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.] Though one of those friends cautioned me against idealizing: “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.”
Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.
I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people’s children, not to yours.] But there are also moments when some part of me wonders whether I am not only missing the biological boat but something I cannot even begin to imagine — an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like a flatlander scoffing at the theoretical concept of sky.
But I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind’s eye can see. Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer, “Although I would never wish I hadn’t had them and I can’t imagine life without them,” I can’t help but wonder whether they don’t have to repress precisely these thoughts on a daily basis.
Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.
The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.
A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”
One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.
Tim Kreider’s articles have appeared in Film Quarterly, The Comics Journal, and The New York Times. His cartoon, “The Pain — When Will It End?” has been collected in two books by Fantagraphics. His Web site is thepaincomics.com.
Saturday, 26 September 2009
Great Night
Recipe: Two great friends, two London bars, gossip and the occasional famous person...
Result: Me giving my number to a VERY cute barman after about five attempts, then going home after many hugs and declarations of love.
Question: Who would be interested in writing a combined effort blog about how music makes you feel?
Love love love xxx
Thursday, 24 September 2009
Cool Quote
"Success... is all about being able to extend love to people... not in a big, capital letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word."
I love this. Though I was pretty surprised that it was Ralph Fiennes was the one who said it. It has been on my mind for the last few days and it's something I generally try to practice but am now consciously doing.
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Redeemed
After various levels of silliness yesterday, all has been resolved and clarified in an extremely tactful and marvellous way.
One of the reasons that I am so impressed with this Jack person is because he strikes me as a genuinely considerate and lovely person - not one to mess people about, whether it be accidentally or on purpose. I had started to wonder over the last couple of weeks whether I had been mistaken in this as things had escalated a bit with some of the stuff he's been saying, but today he proved me right.
Having been wondering whether it might become necessary to have a chat about boundaries after last night, I was relieved and amazed when he somehow managed to make it clear that P (his brilliant girlfriend and my friend) was his priority without making me feel bad or silly or like I'd done something wrong. Whilst doing so his behaviour towards me has still been warm and friendly with no weirdness.
My crush is still there but my confidence that it will go away shortly after this week has increased. My respect for him has gone through the roof. Which is a very pleasant surprise after the whole Mr B shebang - there are men out there with balls and tact. Hurrah!
Friday, 18 September 2009
By the Skin of My Teeth
At what point does one person's responsibility end and anothers begin?
This friend of mine - we'll call him Jack. The guy who is the boyfriend of an amazing friend of mine, we'll call her P. Tonight has been going out night with cast members and all in all it has been a very fun night. However, the summary sent to Farley about half an hour ago was as follows:
"Never been told more times in an evening that I'm hot, cute and gorgeous. I think it's safe to say the crush is not one-sided. Did behave admirably though."
Probably needless to say that P was not with us. Jack was. And apparently, subtlety not so much a strong point. Not least because Mr B was there this evening, laughing loudly in the audience and grovelling quietly in the pub afterwards. When Jack figured that a) he was there and b) who he was; it sort of began. The talk about how he must be off his head to not realise how lucky he was to have me... how (he didn't want to be funny) I was just... awesome. How he'd jump at the chance to be with me in Mr B's position. And so on.
He commented on my outfit ("I have to say that that dress, with those boots... oh my god..."), my hair, my dancing ("you have to teach me to do that sexy dancing...") and many other things. I tried to stick closely with the old faithful - "You're so kind - thank you."
The thing is, it would be too easy to respond to this in an immediate way, and in doing so, fuck over my friend. Even the merest hint of interest on my part would be encouraging behaviour which is already very close to, if not crossing the line on his part. Better to stick with the polite responses and reminders of P; for example after hearing tales of various (highly unattractive) internet date offers that I have received lately, he sent me a text repeating a message I receive occasionally; "Fancy some casual fun?" Funny? Yes. Kick him and threaten to show his girlfriend out of context? Definitely.
My problem is not my behaviour. Or even his really, as by this point I know I am safe in the knowledge that while my mini-crush on this chap is certainly there but by no means putting me in danger of doing anything inappropriate.
My problem is whether to address this or not. I still stand by my original "One week" mantra, where hopefully after the Saturday party things will naturally die off with the lesser time we spend in each other's company. But bearing in mind his request to stage manage on the next show I'm in, this might not be an option.
I am proud of my goodness so far. But gah.
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